The 2013 Hyundai Elantra coupe would do well to morph itself back into a four-door. To my eye, the Elantra sedan is a more svelte and stylish-looking car.
(All photos by Michael Taylor)

The 2013 Hyundai Elantra coupe would do well to morph itself back into a four-door. To my eye, the Elantra sedan is a more svelte and stylish-looking car.
(All photos by Michael Taylor)

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By chopping out two of the sedan's four doors, and making this coupe, Hyundai lost the graceful looks of the four-door. For a car that sacrifices convenience of ingress/egress for the sake of trying to be better looking, the two-door coupe manages to look more conservative than the four-door version. less

By chopping out two of the sedan's four doors, and making this coupe, Hyundai lost the graceful looks of the four-door. For a car that sacrifices convenience of ingress/egress for the sake of trying to be ... more

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On the road, the Elantra Coupe was pretty quiet and its suspension soaked up most of the California roads’ peculiarities. The transmission shifted smoothly and the engine, while somewhat anemic, at least gave pretty good mileage figures (27/37 mpg, city/highway). less

On the road, the Elantra Coupe was pretty quiet and its suspension soaked up most of the California roads’ peculiarities. The transmission shifted smoothly and the engine, while somewhat anemic, at least ... more

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The trunk is fine for a coupe -- enough room for a couple of suitcases and other bags.

The trunk is fine for a coupe -- enough room for a couple of suitcases and other bags.

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Once inside the car, you’ll find that it measures up to Hyundai’s overall sensible ideas of automotive interior.

Once inside the car, you’ll find that it measures up to Hyundai’s overall sensible ideas of automotive interior.

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You have to flop the seatback forward, move the front seat forward and then contort yourself past the all-strangling seatbelt and into the rear seating area, where you plop down, hoping you never have to reverse the process. less

You have to flop the seatback forward, move the front seat forward and then contort yourself past the all-strangling seatbelt and into the rear seating area, where you plop down, hoping you never have to ... more

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It has a straightforward instrument panel, a center stack with the usual useful stuff – in this case, our Elantra Coupe SE had the optional $2,350 technology package that includes navigation, rear view camera and 360-watt stereo system. Oddly, there’s a silvery slash of plastic to the left side of the navigation screen that does its best to reflect itself in the windshield, adding an annoying glare when the sun is at the right place, which was most of the time we were in the car less

It has a straightforward instrument panel, a center stack with the usual useful stuff – in this case, our Elantra Coupe SE had the optional $2,350 technology package that includes navigation, rear view ... more

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2013 Hyundai Elantra coupe -- okay for a two-door, but the four-door Elantra is better looking.

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Let’s start it this way: unless the car is something like a Ferrari, Lamborghini or Aston Martin, I have a general prejudice against coupes. Give me a four-door any day. A coupe, I find, is an exercise in wasted space – that back seat is an utter pain to get into. You have to flop the passenger seatback forward, hope that the front seat moves forward (in the 2013 Hyundai Elantra Coupe, subject of today’s test, it does), and then contort yourself past the all-strangling seatbelt and into the rear seating area, where you plop down, hoping you never have to reverse the process.

I mention all this because coupes have been judged by the world’s motoring public as the more svelte car, the racier ride than a four-door, which is thought of as The Stodgy Sedan. And many of the four-doors are stodgy sedans. But many are not. And in the case at hand, the Hyundai Elantra Coupe, that is the point of the exercise.

The Elantra sedan looks like a diminutive version of the hot-selling Hyundai Sonata. It has swoopy lines that belie its four-doorness and, all in all, is a graceful design. Hyundai should have left well enough alone and not spent the zillions it probably took to create the coupe. But never mind. They went ahead and made the coupe anyway. So what do you get?

A less elegant version of the four-door Elantra

Well, you get a car that looks a bit like the Elantra four-door but they’ve chopped out two of the doors. And somehow, in doing that they lost the graceful looks of the four-door. For a car that sacrifices convenience of ingress/egress for the sake of trying to be better looking, the two-door coupe manages to look more stodgy than the four-door version. A bit of irony, that.

Once inside the car, however, you’ll find that it measures up to Hyundai’s overall sensible ideas of automotive interior. It has a straightforward instrument panel, a center stack with the usual useful stuff – in this case, our Elantra Coupe SE had the optional $2,350 technology package that includes navigation, rear view camera and 360-watt stereo system. Oddly, there’s a silvery slash of plastic on the left side of the center stack that does its best to reflect itself in the windshield, adding an annoying glare when the sun is at the right place, which was most of the time we were in the car.

Not the fastest coupe out there

Power is not the Elantra Coupe’s forte (with apologies to Hyundai’s sister company, Kia, which makes a car called the Forte), what with a 1.8-liter four-cylinder 145 horsepower engine that labors up the freeway ramps through its six-speed automatic transmission. Car and Driver magazine recorded a zero-to-60 time of 8.1 seconds, which in today’s car world, is positively leisurely. Top speed is 121 mph, which really doesn’t matter because, as I’ve said before, in this country if you drive that fast, the odds are that you’ll end up in jail or the cemetery.

On the road, the Elantra Coupe was pretty quiet and its suspension soaked up most of the California roads’ peculiarities. The transmission shifted smoothly and the engine, while somewhat anemic, at least gave pretty good mileage figures (27/37 mpg, city/highway).

Actually, I finally figured out that the ideal buyer of this car is a young professional who wants something that has a slight amount of flair (if you think of two-door cars as having flair), won’t break the bank at the repair shop (N.B. Hyundai’s famed 10-year/100,000-mile warranty), is fairly inexpensive (this loaded-up coupe was priced at $23,965) and will transport five people in what could charitably be called a modicum of comfort (fine in the front seats, not so fine in the rear seats).

Still, there are other coupes out there — the Hyundai Genesis coupe, with a starting price of around $24,000 is a preferable candidate — and then there’s also the four-door Elantra, the car Hyundai should have stayed with as a style leader in that niche.